James Alix: Doctor was right to resist when asked to leave plane

Wednesday

Apr 19, 2017 at 6:36 PMApr 19, 2017 at 6:36 PM

In his April 17 letter “What if man on plane had obeyed instructions?” Mr. Keith Cloutier writes, “What if the passenger had simply done [what] he was told to do by the people in authority? Nobody would have ever heard about it.”

I challenge Mr. Cloutier to substitute the name of any one of our Founding Fathers for the words “the passenger.” We indeed may never have heard of the “United States of America,” which their resistance to England brought about. Or substitute “Martin Luther King Jr.” or “Rosa Parks.” If they had blindly obeyed authority, the rigid segregation of society would have continued.

Sometimes it is necessary to question and even to defy those in authority. “Might” does not necessarily mean “right.”